Sarah McBride. Nikema Williams. Keeda Haynes. These three political trailblazers all have in common streamlining their voter outreach plans with conversational peer-based messaging to run, and in some cases, win their congressional seat held today. Campaign victories result from meticulous outreach strategies driven by useful tools integrated with the best channels for reaching a political target audience. We’ve seen this ring true time and time again, from the candidates that integrate Hustle into their GOTV strategies. This article highlights the best practices for optimizing your next voter outreach plan to help increase engagement and participation from voters and supporters along the campaign trail.
Ways To Optimize Voter Outreach Plans for Campaign Victory
Reassess Your Universe of Contacts. Organize your data and learn your base. Your contact ecosystem consists of key performance metrics, including projected voter turnout, win numbers, and voter base percentages. In its totality, it offers a blueprint of voter favorship in addition to providing a figure of votes required to win your race.
Identify Target Voters. Divide and conquer the polls by segmenting your audience into constituency groups such as supporters, swing voters, or rival voters. A clear understanding of your universe of contacts enables your campaign to segment and engage on an individual level with target voters as you execute your strategy to achieve your goals. Wondering where to start? We suggest the following resources as great places to find (the right) voters:
- Census data
- District viewer
- VAN (Voter Activation Network)
- Scores from VAN
Expand Your Reach. Don’t let a single text, email, or phone call go to waste while promoting and encouraging citizens to register to vote and help shape their communities’ future by voting. Dig deeper into voter data. On the geographic side, you can learn of surprising swing districts (or supporting neighborhoods!).
Create Voter Contact Timeline. After establishing what it takes to win, who you need to engage with to make it happen, and where their location(s), it’s time to map a timeline of how you will reach out to educate, inform, and drive authentic engagement at scale with your voter base.
Introduce Your Campaign & Build Your Team. Traditional cold techniques for the first contact with prospect voters usually include phone calling or commercial messaging. We encourage progressive groups to integrate peer-to-peer text and video messaging as their channel to slice through the noise and drive engagement rates amongst voters. Texting gets your introduction message, voter registration check-in, or campaign information subscription in front of voters through short bursts of highly valuable information through America’s most personal communication channel.
Update Voter Contact Cards. Digital or hardcopy (we recommend digital) contact cards are critical organizational components to tracking canvassed voters. Card field requirements vary based on organization, but typically they include the following categories:
- Personal Identification: Name, address, polling district
- Voter Participation Level: Party affiliation, voting plans, donor history, canvassing experience, volunteer desire
- Special Notes: Voting help (ex: absentee ballot), etc.
Find Your Supporters & Expand Your Universe: The art of persuasion requires a balance of persistence, intensity, and using smart technology to reach voters. Your goals, among others, are to continuously engage the community and answer election-related questions while conducting voter registration drives. Depending on the direction of your campaign, this phase may include any variety of texts, videos, calls, emails, social media tags, event invites, or maybe all the above for persuading voters.
Text Out The Vote! It’s not over until it’s over until the last votes are counted. Leveraging agile outreach tools like peer-to-peer messaging allows you to keep the conversation going with undecided voters until the last minute. Answer final questions or continue to encourage more voters to get to the polls!
Canvass Confidently with Hustle Conversational Peer-Based Messaging
Does your campaign’s communication strategy reflect the needs and interests of your target audience today? It’s time to consider optimizing your next voter outreach plan and the tools you use to get the job done. Texting and video messaging your supporters with Hustle enables your platform to expand its competitive footprint and help drive voters to GOTV. Hustle is the leading peer-to-peer conversational platform for personal, authentic conversations that strengthen relationships with voters.
Contact Hustle today, and let’s start turning texts into new votes.
